Blood and Ebony
by Sera dy Relandrant
Summary: My stepmother was beautiful, the fairest in the land. My father was wise and good and brave - or so they claimed. My suitors were handsome princes, pure of heart and noble. And I? I was a half-breed, an abomination. A re-telling of Snow White.
1. Prologue

_Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, "If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in this frame."_

 **\- Snow White**

* * *

She was one of _those_ women. Tapered white fingers that could not bear the strain of more than tapping out a gentle harmony on the pianoforte or flicking listlessly through a yellow-backed novel. Smooth cuticles and soft palms from a thousand-and-one nights of sleeping in chickenskin gloves. Eyes so wide and blue and simpleminded they would not have looked out of place on a china doll, eyelashes made for batting at men.

And that voice of course, that simpering little voice that needled its way under your skin. "I seem to be a man's woman. I never _can_ understand why all the other women hate me so."

She was all this and more. My lady stepmother. My queen.

She was calling me now, an imperious little rat-tat-tat on the armrest with the blade of her fan. I lingered a moment longer in the shadow of the velvet portieres, long enough to let her draw a martyrlike sigh and inform our guests that I did not mean to be a wicked child, that I was only shy.

I was _not_ shy.

I skulked out from my hiding place, pastry-colored skirts expanding before me as though I were trapped in a meringue. Like all the other women in the room, I had been draped in suitably springlike colors. We looked like a box of gaily-colored macaroons, plump and soft and puddingy, ready to be licked and tasted and eaten. Some of them were plain, some of them pretty. Only my stepmother and I stood out. Anwen for her beauty and I... well I for my ugliness.

"Eira," my stepmother said, patting the spot on the couch right next to her. "Sit, child."

I had a dancing master, an etiquette master and a governess but none of them had managed to instill even the slightest fragments of grace in me. They were poor teachers, agreed, but I was a worse student. I would not be taught. So I sagged into my seat, plumped the fat cushions at my back instead of sitting ramrod seat as Anwen would have preferred (she looked like she had an iron rod thrust up her... well never mind, she was a lady and ladies didn't have arses. Or cunnies or tits or any interesting bits). And then I glared at our guests.

"You remember your cousins," Anwen said, smiling, very agreeable, pretending as though I wasn't an itch under her skin that she longed to scratch.

"They're not my cousins," I said bluntly. The two boys before me were princelings. Oh to be sure in the manner of royal families everywhere, we must have a few shared drops of blood... but that did not make us cousins. They were pretty lads with long golden curls that tickled their high lace collars. The older one, the heir who was a few years older than me, had green eyes. The younger one, less fortunate and about my own age, had only hazel.

"Your kinsmen then," Anwen said, "Prince Sigurd and Prince Leif."

I remembered them. They'd pelted me with horse dung when I was eight.

"Princess Eirwen," the older one, Sigurd, said and made to take my hand. Perhaps to drop a plummy, moist kiss on it. "The pleasure is all mine."

I tucked my hands firmly under my bottom. "I wish I could say the same."

Trust my stepmother to wrangle a courtesy out of even that. She trilled with laughter and nervously, the boys followed suit. "Oh Eira," she said fondly, "Eira, Eira, Eira. Her frankness might be daunting at first but it is her greatest charm, I do believe."

I bared my teeth in a feral smile that made the younger boy fidget uncomfortably with his kidskin gloves. "My only charm," I said. "Bowlegged and brawny, I have nothing else do I?"

For you see, my hands were never made for arranging flowers or flirting with fans. They were made to quarry salt and stone from the harsh earth. My feet were never made to take little, mincing steps on a ballroom parquet, to be slid inside satin hose and silken slippers. They were made to walk bare through miles and miles of tunnels, with baskets of rocks balanced on my head and hips. I was small and stocky and above all, _ugly_.

For you see, my mother was a dwarf.

The Stonecutters, the masters in their ivory towers prefer to call them, The Quarriers. The Children of the Hills. Very civil of them. But in the pigsty villages that are cobbled together from shit and straw, men call them dwarves. And for hundreds of years they have warred with them.

My mother was a chieftain's daughter, the beauty of her tribe. Never beautiful enough for my father, a prince who was bullied into his marriage bed by his own father. Never graceful enough, never dainty enough, never _soft_ enough. But he did his duty by her, ploughing her as regularly as a judicious farmer does his fields, getting her with child every few months. None lived more than a few days, except me - the abomination, the anomaly that made my father pinch his nose as though at a foul stench. She died when I was seven, carrying his twelfth child.

And then my father was free to follow his heart and his heart led him to the first pretty girl his eyes alighted on, outside my dying mother's bedroom door. Anwen was fourteen then, she smiled at him, offered him a cup of mead - oh how his heart must be breaking, she cooed, with the queen screaming in agony just behind them. And then, within a month, they were married.

"On the contrary, my lady," the older prince said, after a moment's consternation. I could almost see the slow, rusty gears of his mind cranking together, fumbling for something pleasant to say. "You have the most exquisite coloring."

"Yes, she has the most beautiful hair and skin you ever saw," my stepmother simpered, thrusting a tea-cake into my hand as though she hoped that if she could keep my mouth stuffed I'd forget to talk. "Really, Eira, I'm forever telling you that if you would _only_ just make an effort-"

Prince Leif looked up from his nervous assessment of his gloves. "Did you grow at all?" he asked me bluntly. "I remember you when you were eight-" he raised his hand a few feet off the ground -"and that was almost six years ago-"

"Princess Eirwen is perfect as she is," his brother said diplomatically.

"I grew," I said sullenly. I would never be the height of a proper human woman but I was taller than a dwarf, as tall as a human child. My stepmother had the shoemakers insert heels in my shoes but they made my feet ache so that I sawed them all off one night. Fifty pairs of shoes - dancing slippers, sleeping slippers, winter boots, riding boots, walking shoes, parlor shoes, fur and silk and velvet and leather. It took me the whole night but the look on Anwen's face was worth it.

"Daintiness becomes a woman," Anwen began in conciliation and I hooted. I was short but I was not _dainty_. "Yes, Eira?" my stepmother said, her face crumpling as though the weight of my presence had physically exhausted her.

"May I be excused?"

"You may-"

I never even bothered to let her finish. I didn't need her consent. I was off as fast as my stumpy little legs could carry me, my peach-and-pumpkin skirts wafting out in front of me. On cue, my ladies-in-waiting fell into line behind me like a rope of resentful ducklings. They didn't want to follow me out of the salon where there was dancing and cakes and handsome, flirtatious gentlemen and I didn't want them behind me but we were stuck with eachother. If a princess didn't look like a princess should, the next best thing was an army of servants.

We barged headlong into my father and his retinue, traveling towards the queen's salon.

"Papa," I said and fluttered into a nervous curtsy. The only one in the world who could ever make me nervous was my papa. And with good reason. "I'm sorry, I didn't see you."

"My little tempest." He sighed but there was no amused affection in his voice, no indulgence that a father might bear towards a beloved daughter. For I was not, I had never been, beloved. Normally I would be in for it - oh the eye-rolling, the grimaces, the snapping fingers, the soft voice that was never raised to his daughter but seared nevertheless - but today my father was otherwise occupied. He had his newest mistress on his arm, a girl scarcely older than I was. She had apple cheeks and breasts popping out so far from her gown, you could almost see her painted nipples.

"Eira," he only said and contented himself with a horsy sigh. "Have you met our guests?"

"Oh yes," I said. "Ask Anwen. I sat with them and we sipped tea and had little pink cakes. Oh and we told each other stories. Such lovely stories!"

"Hmph." I expected my father to breeze past but he lingered while the girl on his arm pouted and pressed her breasts into his elbow, clearly frustrated at the lack of attention directed towards her. "I hope you were civil at least. To Sigurd at least."

I raised an eyebrow. "Matchmaking, Papa?" It wouldn't be the first time. Without any sons by Anwen, I was my father's only heir.

"He's a handsome lad." Shrug. "I thought you might enjoy his company."

"So are you, Papa," I said. "Handsome." He smiled faintly and then I added, "But it didn't stop me turning out like something you'd find in the garderobe chute." That wiped his smug little smile away nicely.

"I will expect you at supper," he told me. He glanced at me and frowned. "Wear something that suits you, for heaven's sake. Anwen should see you better dressed. Your mother's rubies. Wear those." My mother had come to her marriage with three wagons of jewels and gold. My father never forgot those.

"A ruby mask would be better," I called out after him as he left. "I'm sure mother brought enough to make a mask." He pretended not to hear.


	2. The King

Black-browed and with a face like a knot of wood, my mother scowled down at me.

Oh to be sure, she _looked_ queenly. For the state portrait (her one and only), she had been first tethered inside a steel-and-whalebone skeleton and then crystallized, like a fly trapped in amber, in a pompous, frothing confection of ivory brocade. Pearls and gold coins spilled out of her small hands. You could not see the ornate hem of her gown or her narrow doeskin slippers for the ground was covered with gold and jewels six inches deep.

She had brought three wagons of treasures with her to my father's palace and she had insisted that all of them be painted into the portrait with her. That was the dwarven way, she once told me in a rare moment of confidence. She never liked me much either and unlike my father, seldom even pretended to. _The treasures of the earth are the only ones worth having, Eirwen Sangsakrir._ Eirwen Skychild, Daughter of the Cloud People as she called me.

Helgund her name was and she was shackled with diamonds. Ropes of rubies dripped down from her white, white flesh, sapphires snaked around her throat. Gold bullions and silver coins were heaped all around her, in their glittering towers they stood taller than she did. As I remembered her, the only time she ever seemed at peace was when she was surrounded by her wealth.

Anwen had commissioned a hundred portraits during her reign. State portraits in ceremonial robes, the trains as long as a chapel nave, and more intimate ones where she liked to be depicted frolicking in groves like a shepherdess or as a mermaid on a rock, a nymph in a grotto, an orange-seller in the market. In borrowed costumes, which caught her fancy, with dimpled cheeks and dancing eyes. My mother had but the one.

"May I have it, please?" I asked my father when I was seven and still grieving for the hard-hearted dwarven woman who never really loved me, who was only resigned to my birth. I'd heard her once, whispering to a lady-in-waiting when she thought I was too young to understand. _I'd rather have a hundred miscarriages than carry another half-breed to term._

My father, in hot pursuit of Anwen's virtue at the time, only shrugged and told me to see his chamberlain about the portrait. Traditionally a queen's state portrait hung in the royal gallery but this was a queen best forgotten, best hidden behind black drapes like a shameful thing and secreted in an unwanted princess's rooms. And so the chamberlain was only too pleased to offer it to me.

"Rubies," I told my ladies-in-waiting after poking out my tongue at my mother's portrait. I always did. I never wanted anyone to think I missed the sulky old hag. "My father wants me to look _beautiful_ tonight." I rolled my eyes like a horse and some of the bolder ones sniggered. _No really, princess? You and beautiful? Has he lost his wits?_ The ones who had been with me the longest had trained themselves to read my moods, they knew that I liked nothing better than a hearty dose of self-deprecation.

Shiera, my newest maid-of-honor, as buttery and toothsome as a roll fresh from the oven, chose to take me seriously. She was only fourteen, about my own age. "Red becomes you, Princess," she said eagerly. "Perhaps a sapphire silk to really bring out the contrast-"

"Yes," I said amused. "Why not? Perhaps a wig too, touched up with some light blue powder to match the gown?"

"Oh yes indeed," she said quickly, almost salivating to be of service. "But of course your own hair is exquisite as it is-"

"Shiera," I said lightly. "Sweet Shiera." Like a mantis springing a trap, I clicked my fan lightly on the edge of my armchair, inviting her to come closer. Like a well-trained pup she bounded over and then I sprang. "Little madam, I am not beautiful. I do not wear powder or false hair or creams to make my skin glow or my lips bloom, is that understood? I do not preen for men. You wish to curry my favor, yes? Very good. Keep your lips closed when I am in the room and your legs when my father is and I might grow to tolerate you." I rapped her on the knuckles twice, not hard enough to draw blood but hard.

Her lips trembled, a fat tear dropped down her cheek but she must have known tears would be the last thing to work on me. Meekly she bowed her head and mumbled, "Yes, my lady."

I wore a red gown that night. With my rubies, I looked like a furnace - unsavorily warm. I was so ugly I took my own breath away - the heavy brow ridge with thick, snakelike black brows, the squat, pug nose, the black down of hair creeping up my cheeks, the prominent, bony chin and the stocky, stunted body stuffed into what was meant to be a beautiful gown.

"Shiera, sweet girl," I called to her, taking a malicious pleasure in tormenting the innocent child. Perhaps my soul was born twisted like my body. "Perhaps I was unkind to you earlier. Forgive me." I took her hands in mine to show her that I meant her no harm. Her nails were painted a very pale lavender, like a dawn sky, a wispy, wimpish color much like the girl herself. "You must tell me all about yourself. Where you grew up. How you were like when you were a little girl. Your family."

The girl had the look of a hatchling caught by a garden snake. But bravely she swallowed and tried. "I grew up in Meridian, my lady."

"Corn country."

"Yes, my lady. I'm one of the Elensarii, we've tended the land for you for hundreds of years." By tended the land the simple-minded child meant supervised the peasants, but she looked so pleased with herself that I didn't correct her.

"I've sure the land's prospered under your family's stewardship."

"Oh it has!" Here she looked ready to launch into a discussion of soil and planting seasons, ploughs and cows - matters of the utmost importance to a country girl, I was sure, but which held scant interest for me.

"And what were you like as a child?"

"Oh I was so wicked," she giggled. "I used to climb trees with my brothers - I have five you know -, I used to run away and hide in the woods when my governess called for me to sit and sew with her, I sneaked a mouse into-" It was a trite litany of trite childish misdeeds. She wasn't really a wicked child, not like I was, only high-spirited and mischievous. "But now I'm a proper lady," she solemnly assured me, as though it were a great accomplishment. And perhaps it was, for I had never mastered the trick of it. "I hope to serve you well and honorably, Princess, as my family has done yours for centuries."

"You're a sweet child," I told her. "Do you want to know what I was like when I was a little girl?"

"I should like nothing more, Your Highness!" she cried, clasping my hands, cornflower eyes shining with hope. I could almost see her composing a letter to her dear mamma back home. _Princess Eirwen and I are fast on our way to becoming bosom friends! To think, she told me all about herself and asked me to call her Eira!_

"When I was seven, my mamma died," I told her.

Shiera moaned in sympathy.

"After the burial, I shut myself up in my chamber. Alone. I clawed at my skin-" those were the days they let me keep my nails long and painted -"till it peeled off in long, white strips like an onion's rings. It took them hours to break down my door but I don't think they tried too hard. Perhaps they hoped I might die like my mamma. I didn't do it for grief of her nor because I wished to die and make my papa happy. I only did it because I thought- I thought that perhaps underneath all that dwarf, there might be some human in me. A lovely, lightsome girl who might make my father smile, make him forget all the whores he was chasing." I smiled at her. "It didn't work, of course. My skin healed and quickly too. Dwarvish skin always does."

"Oh," was all the pretty little imbecile could say. "Oh."

I patted her little blond head. "This is your first time at court, Shiera. You should enjoy yourself. You'll have men flocking around you like bees around a honeyflower." She was that kind of pretty, small and curly-haired and angel-faced.

"I don't-"

"Just remember, sweet," I told her. "If I catch you flocking around my father, I will slit your throat." And then I kissed her powdered cheek.

* * *

Princesses were enjoined to pick at their food - a nibble of salad leaves here, a lick of ice-cream there, their governesses might remind them, a bite of biscuit and perhaps a sip of soup. To arrange and re-arrange the minute quantities of food already on their plates in increasingly artistic formations while never actually eating it of course.

Not me. I ate like a hunter, fresh from the kill. The governesses had protested until I stabbed the last squawker in the eye with my fish knife. After that, the story spread and they wisely refrained. After teaching me to tell the different knives and spoons from each other and what courses came in when, they had rather given up on the etiquette to be followed at mealtimes. But they never could have told me the most important lesson that I should remember when I attended great state banquets.

Over steaming joints of meat, fried and curried and baked animal carcasses, I listened. And I watched.

My father, who fancied himself a great master in the arts of love, had eyes only for his newest mistress. He fed her cherries from his own hands and she licked the sugar and cream off his fingers. An older, wiser wife would have rolled her eyes at this display and let it go but Anwen was too young, too insecure in her position to let it go without a fight. She retaliated in the only way she knew how - by flirting as desperately as she could with Prince Siguard who was seated next to her. They were both of an age and they both possessed in generous measures the sanctimoniousness and the utter ignorance of the ways of the world that is given to the young and beautiful. They drank to indiscretion and their whispers and their stifled giggles gave rise to more than a few murmurs and raised eyebrows - just as my father's did.

But while the king's rankest follies might pass without more than a few grimaces, the slightest whiff of indecorum on the queen's part would unleash a monstrous scandal. I wondered if she knew. I hope she didn't.

Prince Leif was squashed between me and Rosalyn, a distant cousin of mine and an old enemy. A duke's only daughter, she had been as spoiled by earthly luxuries as I had been and just as thoroughly neglected. Perhaps that was why she was so eager for his attention. She did her best to attract it, peppering him with a hundred questions designed to make him feel brave and strong and manly, pouting her mouth into a kissable rosebud, alternating between widening her eyes and giggling whenever he spoke to her. It didn't seem to work.

"Don't you like girls?" I asked him, popping a stuffed mushroom in my mouth. In the mines, I was told, there was no shame between the dwarfs. Like animals, they mated with members of their own sex - quite contrary to all civilized practice, the priests insisted.

"I do. I like pretty girls," he said sulkily. "I just don't like the girls _here_." He gave me a very pointed glare.

"I'm not a girl," I told him cheerfully. "I'm an abomination, we all know. But my sweet coz, Lady Rosalyn, is."

"I have a girl back home," he said.

"Really? Do tell."

He flushed like the little tomatoes that he'd pushed to the side of his plate - a picky eater like all boys his age, it seemed. "I do," he insisted. "She has brown hair and blue eyes and her name is-her name is- Anwenette!" He glared at me. "You don't believe me, do you?" he said bullishly, clearly looking for a fight. His older brother had not been looking out for him as well as he should, he had downed half a dozen measures of wine in half an hour it seemed.

"I never said that," I said carefully. You did not poke at a hornet's nest with a stick, no matter how tempting the prospect.

"Well real or not, she's a sight better than what my brother will end up with!" Prince Leif said it so loudly they all heard at the high table. Anwen turned her pretty head and grew pale when she heard, my father red with temper. Handsome Prince Sigurd bit his lip, looking like a man caught with his bum in the air and his drawers around his skinny knees.

"Perhaps your brother has had a cup too much," my father told Sigurd with icy courtesy.

"Forgive him, Your Grace," the boy said quickly. "He's only fourteen-"

"My daughter's age," my father only said. "And yet, she has managed to comport herself with dignity this evening." _La papa, high praise._

"I-I will see him out. Please excuse us, Your Grace."

"Pray do so."

A footman drew back Prince Leif's chair and Prince Sigurd hastily escorted him out of the room, their purple-faced ambassador trailing after them, already composing a stern lecture in his head. _Boys, what do you think your father will say when I write to him? Conducting yourself like barroom brawlers before the king, shameful, shameful!_ I hope he added, _and no sugar biscuits for you either, Prince Leif, not till you shapen up!_ That would be too delicious for words.

"What a dreadful little boy," I said quite clearly, before the princes left the room. Prince Leif turned around and flashed me a look of such fury I thought he'd march right back and sock me in the eye - of course he would never do that to a real girl, a real little lady, but I didn't count. But his brother placed a hand on the small of his back and shoved him firmly out of the room. "Such a frightful temper."

"Leif is still a child," my father only said. "It is his brother that concerns us."

I raised an eyebrow as though to say, _but it might run in the family, you know?_ But I said nothing. Instead I turned to Rosalyn who was my sometimes-ally, usually-enemy. "Do they expect to make a match of it?" I whispered to her.

"They're impoverished little princelings," she whispered back at me, black eyes sparkling with joyful malice. "If they won't have you, nobody will."

 _Impoverished, eh?_ "I thought they stopped by here as part of their Grand Tour," I said. Young gentlemen of a certain age and rank liked to finish off their educations with proper eclat, nothing finished off a gentleman better than a Grand Tour of the continent. It usually included a great deal of sightseeing, letter-writing, sonnet-scripting and lovemaking to bored baronesses.

"That's a cover, my love," Rosalyn told me cheerfully. "What they're looking for is chickens to be plucked - little heiresses with fat fortunes." She shrugged. "Well, you need a husband," she said practically. "And they need money. It sounds just perfect, don't you think?"

I glanced at Anwen, playing sulkily with her fish-knife and my father laughing merrily and fishing cherries out of his mistress's bodice. He had already forgotten all about the Leif boy. "Yes," I said. "For one of us, at least."

* * *

Father summoned me to his study that night.

My father called himself a naturalist. The woods and the wild, he once grandly announced to his disinterested womenfolk, were God's own book written in His own hand. His study, arranged to his own taste, reflected this fervent belief.

When I was a little girl, he sometimes let me play in that room - arranging birds' eggs and beasts' claws in order of size and color on beds of wine-colored velvet, watching artisans stuff dead animals into facsimiles of their living counterparts, inspecting bits of roots and barks and dried flower petals from distant lands who's names we could not pronounce with brass magnifying glasses. Sometimes he would let me curl up into his lap while he read from those great books he had stacked on the walls. Those were the best days of my life.

A servant had placed a silver salver with two cups of steaming hot chocolate on a side-table. Mine had a stick of cinnamon in it, just the way I liked it. Father was already encased in a velvet dressing-gown and gold-tasseled slippers when I entered, sipping at his hot chocolate and flicking through a dry old book. If I knew my father it was probably a military history, a dusty, dull tome of battles long gone by. Not that father ever really read them cover-to-cover - he only liked to pretend to, just enough to pepper drawing-room conversation with a few clever phrases and vague references to historic events. It made him seem more erudite.

"Eira," he began pleasantly, drawing out a chair for me. "Sit, sit."

"Do you remember, Papa," I said, unable to stop myself, "when I was small and you used to let me sit on your lap? And I'd pretend I could read your books?"

He gave me a curious look. "Yes. What of it?"

"Oh nothing. It was a pleasant time."

"And long gone by," he said briskly. "You're not a little girl anymore, Eira. You're a woman, fourteen years old now." _You've had your moon's blood, you're ready to breed me heirs,_ he really meant but of course he would never be indelicate enough to say that out loud. Father was the first gentleman of the realm and gentlemen did not speak crassly in front of ladies - serving-maids and the lower classes were a different matter, of course.

"Thirteen," I reminded him wearily. "I'll be fourteen in a month."

"And what better time to be wed?" he said, beaming at me. "You liked Sigurd, I hope? Handsome, a sweet-tempered lad. Surely you'd prefer to have your own household, rather than be forever under Anwen's thumb. You could order your own gowns to suit yourself, go out when you pleased and where, command your servants as you would-"

Yes, he was a handsome lad even I would have to admit with those thick honey curls twisted like fat sausages on his head and wide, blank lake-green eyes. I could not vouch for the sweetness of his temper. "Does it _have_ to be Sigurd?" I asked plaintively, remembering those blank eyes and the pleasantly vacant expression he always seemed to wear on his face. "He's a fool."

My father did not correct me. "Well yes, a little," he acknowledged. "His father confesses as much to me. But he's kind and gentle and you've brains enough for the both of you, I suppose." He peered at me curiously as though I was some strange new species of beetle that he'd have liked to study. My father was very taken with beetles these days, though I could not say why. Dreadful little monsters. If he liked monsters so much, he could have spent more time with me. He liked to study his beetles under those new-fangled eyeglasses he imported from the north. Take them apart and then sew them back. Stuff them with straw or cotton and mount them on corkboard or display them under glass. "Why the frown, child? Would you rather have someone else?"

"No."

"Leif perhaps?" he asked hopefully. "He's not as thick as his brother, though we know him to be more rash. His temper burns hotter, must come from his mother's side, she was a-"

I sipped my hot chocolate. "They're both men," I said bluntly. _Men of the woods. Men of the green lands._ "Not my kind."

"You are my daughter-" my father began. _A fact that you've always tried your best to forget,_ I thought bitterly. "Of course they are your kind."

"You mated with one of my kind and you had me," I told him. "A curse I'd wish on no man living. My children will be just as foul." _If I ever have any,_ I thought. My mother had borne twelve and out of them, only I'd lived. There was a reason priests insisted that kin should mate with kin.

"You are no closer in kind to the dwarves than you are to us," my father said, his face darkening. His slender fingers closed and opened convulsively through empty air as though he would have liked nothing better than to strangle me into obedience. _You are my daughter. Mine._ "Should you mate with one of them, your children were be just as tainted as those borne to a true man."

Half-breed. Half-breed. I would be an abomination to my mother's kind and my father's. I fit in nowhere.

He laughed suddenly, seizing delightedly on a moment of my weakness. "Do you think they will like you better there, under the earth, than we do here?" he asked, sneering. "That you will be fairer to them than you are to us, some sort of goddess? Fool. They have their own way of weighing beauty and you would not fit it."

I had hoped. A foolish hope perhaps, a child's fancy but the only one to sustain me. I had thought they would find me beautiful.

"You know nothing of their kind," he told me contemptuously.

"How could I?" I demanded, my temper flaring. "Ever since my mother died, you have kept all knowledge of it away from me!" With my mother's death, her dwarvish ladies-in-waiting who had contrived to teach me bits of their language, their secret histories and legends and rituals, had been dismissed.

"With good reason," he said. "I'll have no more abominations tainting my line. You will wed Sigurd and you will, with God's grace, have children while I am still in my prime. The taint will still be in them but not so deep as in you, not so deep..."

So there I was. A stepping stone, a bridge to the next generation.

"Anwen might still give you a son," I said, but not without much hope. They had been wed almost seven years and with nothing to show for it, no boy or girl. Anwen's waist remained as narrow as a wasp's.

"Anwen has outlived her purpose," my father said, as dismissively as he might have spoken of a toy he had outgrown. As though he were still a child playing in the nursery and perhaps he still was. Kings would always be spoiled children, how could we expect anything more of them? And princesses and queens, no matter how beautiful or ugly, no matter how stupid or clever, would always be their tools. "She will have to be-"

"Discarded?" I suggested.

He glared at me. "Your tongue and your imagination both run away with you, Eira," he said coldly. "Do you think me some sort of monster?" _Yes_. "No, child, not discarded. Dismissed, perhaps."

"Killed?" I sniggered. "How else to dismiss a living wife, Papa?"

"There are nunneries," he said vaguely. "Places of rest for those who seek peace of mind, a voluntary retreat..."

I could just imagine Anwen with her head shaved, draped in sackcloth and smeared with the ashes of the holy. "How lovely," I said and I really meant it. She would rather have been buried alive. "Who's going to tell her?" _Please let it be me. Please let it be me._

"I think she might wish to announce it to the world herself," he said dismissively. "I will make her see reason."

I couldn't stop myself from giggling. My father frowned at this display of levity. "And are we to say hip, hip, hurray, three cheers for Queen Gwynne next?"

"Gwynne?" My father looked at me blankly. And then he chortled as though he found the idea laughable. "Heavens, no."

"You seemed particularly taken with her company at dinner tonight." I waggled my eyebrows suggestively at him.

"Whores have their uses," my father only said. "But no man of any sense ever marries his mistress. Remember that and remember that well, Eira. No man has any use for a woman who gives up her virtue willingly."

"Yes, Papa," I said meekly.

"Though," he said, with a quick, dismissive glance at me, "I doubt that any man will attempt to lay siege to your virtue any time soon. Or at any time at all." Father was a gentleman. He did not need to shout at me, to scream and smash my head against the wall and call me dirty names to hurt me.

He crossed his fingers over my head, a quick blessing, and then stooped to kiss my cheeks. "It's cold tonight for summer, remember to wrap yourself up warmly in bed. Sleep well, Eira."

"Yes Papa." My voice was a whisper.


End file.
